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APM - Application Portfolio Management

APM helps IT managers to make better decisions about application changes, competence needs and other productivity issues.

APM is based on a set of metrics from different tools that system developers use in their daily work:

Tool Description Metric
Errand and Workflow Management  This type of tool handles the workflow for a project or a software maintenance team. It is a list of change requests, questions and to-dos. This tool is used to keep track of who do what when and how much time is spent on each task.

Small teams might be managed in Excel documents, larger teams and departments have customed applications or purchased tools to manage the workflow.

What metric is available depends on tool and extent of use. Here are some key metrics of interest:

- Errands for change per 
  application over time

- Time spent (cost) per errand
  and application over time

Application Mining  See What is it? If the Application Mining tool has an open database that allows writing own reports or programs, there is a lot of metrics to get. Here are some key metrics of interest:

- Function Points per application
  over time, for example by 
  IFPUG (ISO 20926), 
  NESMA (ISO 24570), 
  Mark II (ISO 20968) or 
  COSMIC (ISO 19761). 

- Complexity per application 
  over time, for example 
  McCabe Complexity Measure.

The function of the APM tool is to retrieve the metrics and show them to IT managers in different views. The views together is the APM Dashboard.

It is possible to create a basic APM tool in Excel and use some VBA-macros to retrieve the metrics from your Errand and Workflow Management tool and from the Application Mining tool. ResourceMiner has an open database that can be accessed from within Excel or any program of choice.

Version 2.2 and later of ResourceMiner includes SQL Reports for Complexity metrics and different kinds of LOC-measurements.

There are solutions for Function Points reporting and APM but not published as a part in the latest version of ResourceMiner. Licensed users are welcome to request for more information about this topic. APM can take you up to level 5 in the CMM model.